Abstract

Cherrie Moraga lays claim to an economy of desire shared not along the lines of sexual orientation, but through a cultural imaginary that crosses borders between the United States and Mexico. Moraga’s claim provokes me to explore Chicana lesbian representations that are clearly inspired by certain sexual spectacles that circulate through the Chicano and Mexican communities of “South Texas, L.A. or even Sonora, México.”

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What I need to explore will not be found in the feminist lesbian bedroom, but more likely in the mostly heterosexual bedrooms of South Texas, L.A., or even Sonora, México.

—Cherrie Moraga2

This chapter is drawn from my book, With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians (forthcoming from University of Texas Press). Throughout this essay, I mark the definitive article in the phrase “‘the’ Aztec princess,” following Norma Alarcón’s “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘the’ Native Woman,” in Cultural Studiesvol. 4, no. 3 (October 1990): 248–256. Alarcón challenges the anthropological construction of Native women as interchangeable, as well as the Mexican nationalist reading of Aztec history, which attributes the Spanish conquest of the Americas to the compliance of Native women. Blame for the “fall” of the Aztec empire is embodied in the person of Malinalli Tenepal, and passed down genetically as a type of “original sin” to all Mexican (and by extension Chicana) women. Alarcón sees the Chicana feminist reappropriation of the Native woman identity as an effort to move beyond the cultural nationalist construction of “La Chicana” as an imaginary unified subject always inscribed in relation to “El” Chicano.

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Notes

3.

See Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe & the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (New York and London: Methuen, 1986). “The major feature of this myth is the ideal of cultural harmony through romance” (141). “This myth of Pocahontas has its own interest… Strictly speaking it is a product of the early nineteenth-century search for a … national heritage” (141). “It is difficult to disentangle the confluence of the literary topos of the ‘enamoured princess’ from the historical examples, of whom Pocahontas and Malinche are only the best known. Much can be put down to male fantasy …” (300, n. 15). While Mexican nationalism in the nineteenth century displaced the “cultural harmony through romance” myth for La Malinche, in the case of Pocahontas the myth is still very much a part of U.S. cultural identity. “The final resolution of the colonial triangle [is] a splitting of the problematic third term, a severance of niece [Pocahontas] and [her] uncle [Algonquin leader Opechankanough, blamed for the 1622 ‘massacre’ of the Virginia colonists], available female and hostile male, ‘good’ Indian and ‘bad’ Indian, which leaves Pocahontas to be mythologized” and her uncle vilified (170).Google Scholar

4.

Rafael Pérez-Torres, Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 191. Other variations of this myth suggest that Popocatépetl was not from a rival tribe but of “plebeian” origin (Calendarios Landin, 1998). Pérez-Torres’s retelling of this myth indicates that Popo is “guarding [Ixta’s] pregnant body” (191). I have omitted the reference to the pregnancy in the quote above, as I have not found it elsewhere, and also because the paintings themselves give no indication of pregnancy. At the same time, this variation could serve to mark the Aztec Princess further as a sexual body: She is no virgin princess.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

For further discussions of Native American women in the Anglo American imaginary, see Rayna Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture,” Massachusetts Review 16 (1975): 698–714Google Scholar

For an analysis of how sex is intertwined with the colonial imaginary, see Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), particularly chapters 2 and 5.Google Scholar